For the past two years, a giant space on Science Drive has been a noisy mess of collaborative vision.
But starting in August, the vision will make a little less noise and a little more impact as the recently completed Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences opens its doors and 324,000 square feet for business.
As of July 13, CIEMAS's desks and cabinets still held only dust, waiting for the building to earn its certificate of occupancy before eager faculty, who until now have been crowded into too-cramped quarters, can join the furniture already filling up the airy work spaces.
The Pratt School of Engineering has expanded its faculty over the past several years in preparation for plans to enlarge its undergraduate program. Starting in Fall 2005, the school will admit an additional 50 freshmen each year. The faculty and the school are bursting the seams of Hudson Hall, and Kristina Johnson, dean of Pratt, has had to find space in Erwin Square Mill and other remote locations for professors' laboratories.
"For four years some of our most productive faculty have been off campus," Johnson said. "We've rented space all over Durham. I'm just so excited that they can come home."
That home is starting to look like a nice place to live.
The walls are lined with cherry wood veneer and the windows in common spaces stretch from floor to ceiling. The classrooms are all equipped with Internet access and comfortable lecture hall chairs.
The building was designed with students in mind, Johnson said. The main stairway sits in the middle of a multi-story atrium that will eventually be ringed with desks for study space. Several glass conference rooms are earmarked for student use only and faculty cannot enter without invitation, Johnson noted.
Off the atrium, one room remains mostly undeveloped, lacking the gloss of the rest of the building.
Someday soon, this high-tech classroom might act as a "six-sided cave" where every wall is a projection television. Eventually, this room might become the ultimate practice space for University sports teams. Johnson has already had conversations with head football coach Ted Roof about programming football defense strategies and letting a quarterback simulate offensive plays against movie screen opponents.
"This is dreaming," confessed Johnson, "but it's not 'Star Trek' talk."
For Provost Peter Lange, who took a walking tour of the construction July 13, the symbolic picture was almost as exciting as the prospect of a building where the football team could share space with Duke University Medical Center and the growing engineering school.
Once upon a time the area was a parking lot and some forest, and now it's a quadrangle with social sciences, humanities, engineering and medicine buildings all within collaborating--and shouting--distance of each other.
"Here's your intellectual idea," Lange said softly, as he stood on one of the CIEMAS patios gazing at the Divinity School and the back of Perkins Library.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.